Dirk Bogarde: a film star and writer in Grasse
- Tom Richardson
- Jan 31
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 16
Many years ago, when any idea of moving to France had never even crossed my mind, I read Dirk Bogarde’s first two books of memoirs. Then, after someone told me recently that Bogarde lived near Grasse for a time, I found on my bookshelves my forty year old copy of his second volume, ‘Snakes and Ladders’. In the last chapter he describes his purchase of a permanent home in Chateauneuf de Grasse.
Dirk Bogarde (1921-1999) was an English film actor and writer, although his remarkably long baptismal name (Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde) indicates Flemish and Scottish ancestry. He came to Chateauneuf in 1970 and lived here until 1987. He became a writer and completed his first three volumes of autobiography in those years. He recounts living in Chateauneuf in the third book, ‘An Orderly Man’ (1983) and later in a fifth, ‘A Short Walk from Harrods’ (1993).
His writing style can sometimes be a little long-winded, even florid, but it certainly works, because I find when reading him that an hour can have gone by without my noticing the time. He produced no less than seven books of his memoirs in all, along with six novels and reputedly quite a lot of poetry, most of it destroyed.
For twenty years and while making over 60 films, Bogarde had lived in large houses in the countryside around London and been constantly entertaining friends, acquaintances and colleagues. Many of them stayed in his houses and there were always large parties for lunch and dinner. He was also accustomed to employing a substantial household staff, including housekeeper, cook, maids, etc.
Clearly, money was not a problem during this part of his film career.
But by 1969, at the age of 48, he seems to have undergone something of a mid-life crisis. Since 1960, he had moved on from the ‘matinee idol’ period of his films for J Arthur Rank (most notably the ‘Doctor in the House’ series) and appeared in more serious films like Victim (1961), The Servant (1963), Darling (1965) and The Damned (1969), which made him much less money. He sold his most recent large house near Guildford and looked for somewhere on the Cote d’Azur. He describes sitting in the Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence and drawing a radius on a map of twenty kilometres to the south-west as his search area.
Where he ended up was pretty much on the far edge, a little south of the village centre of Chateauneuf. Like others moving here (me included!), he didn’t really know what he was doing. He describes acquiring an old farmhouse with 15 hectares of olives. It sounds as if, had an estate agent been involved, he would have described it as ‘lots of potential’ – and we all know what that means!
When he comes to sign the papers, he hasn’t brought along his own lawyer and clearly has no idea what he’s signing. To his shock, he has to wait three months to take possession.
Only as a special concession are he and his architect allowed to take measurements for his planned changes. Then he leaves his architect to manage the whole process while he’s making the film Death in Venice.
At least, he chooses a good architect. Leon Loschetter came from Luxembourg and specialised in churches, but as a visiting professor at Pennsylvania University, he was a member of a group of architects who finished second in the contest to build the Sydney Opera House. He lived and worked in Grasse from 1955 until his death in 2013.
When Bogarde returns from Venice, his first reaction is that the house is exactly as he wants it – only to find that not only is there no electricity but that the main supply cable has been plastered in somewhere, never to be found again.
He describes the location as ‘quite remote’.
The lanes and walls in the quarter surrounding his house are today still quite rural and Bogarde describes a nightmare process of trying to get medical help when his mother has a fall. But later he talks about people building or renovating houses nearby and of protecting his land with walls, fences and even bamboo. Given the number of houses scattered across the area, it really can't be called 'remote' today.
His memoirs read more like novels, often reproducing detailed ‘conversations’ which really took place (if at all) several or even many years before. His biographer, John Coldstream writes that ‘Dirk was a writer whose entire oeuvre became a fiction, thanks in large part to his hyperactive imagination and his fantasies – fantasies so vivid and powerful that they were, for him, a reality.’
As he starts his life in his new house, he finds that maintaining and harvesting 400 olive trees is effectively impossible and what he thinks are scattered boulders are where terrace walls have collapsed. Then he discovers that the apparently abundant water on his land is actually leaking from what he says is a supply reservoir for Cannes.
This puzzled me a little, because his land is on the side of a hill in between the valleys of the Loup, Brague and Mourachonne, so it should be dry. Taking into account what Coldstream said about him, I wondered if this was a piece of fantasy. But then when I walked nearby trying to get a decent photo of his house, the culprit became obvious.
Just above the house is a water treatment plant owned by SICASIL, which is indeed the body responsible for Cannes’ water. Supplying it is a canal, which might have been open in Bogarde’s day when it was controlled by Lyonnaise des Eaux (now Suez) but is covered today. If there is a reservoir as well, it’s hidden and not shown on maps. With Lyonnaise’s cavalier attitude to water leaks before SICASIL took over the Loup system in 1991, it’s hardly surprising that water was flowing down the hill and killing his olive trees. He might have been better off offering to repair their canal than putting in his own drainage!
He also talks about legally settling in France. In those days long before free movement, he describes going to the Mairie every three months to get his residence permit renewed. He sees a notably unhelpful British consul in Nice about obtaining legal assistance with residence, with total lack of success. Finally, he obtains permission via the Mairie to be a permanent foreign resident. It’s all quite a contrast to my own experience in 2000, when, long pre-Brexit, we simply turned up here.
Later, he describes all the improvements he makes to the house and land, financed by making more films, including 'Providence'. At one point (and one hopes it's not one of Coldstream's 'fantasies') he discovers names on a wall penciled by Jewish children taking refuge in the house in 1943 while in transit out of France.
Some of his descriptions (written in his 1993 volume) are reminiscent of Peter Mayle, whose ‘Year in Provence’ came out in 1989. I think he must have read it! As with Mayle, all his workmen want to modernise the house, whereas he obviously wants to keep it matched to his own image of rural Provence.
His time in France came to a close in 1987. Like several ‘heart throb’ stars of his era (Rock Hudson, for example) he was gay. He had a life-long partnership with his manager, Anthony Forwood, with whom he lived in Chateauneuf. Bogarde had bravely made the film ‘Victim’ in 1961 about the blackmailing of a successful gay lawyer, at a time when male homosexuality was a criminal offence.
Forwood was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1982 and then with cancer in 1984. The pair made the reluctant decision to move first to Paris, then to return to the UK. Bogarde describes their goodbyes to workmen, friends, shopkeepers and others in sometimes moving detail.
Forwood died in 1989 and Bogarde made his last film in the following year. 'Daddy Nostalgie' was mostly made in Cannes and is set there. Some of Bogarde's dialogue is in French.
Bogarde's acting and writing career was recognised in France by his being made Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1990. He was also knighted in the UK in 1992.
If you'd like to know more, there's quite a nice website about Bogarde, built by his nephew, here, and most of his books are available on Kindle.
Dirk Bogarde's memoirs undoubtedly have a charm, and the strong links in ‘An Orderly Man’ and ‘A Short Walk from Harrods’ to Grasse make those volumes worth reading, even if it’s wise to skip several chapters, especially those about his family. Perhaps one of Bogarde's publishers should edit together all his writing about his time in France and publish it as a new volume!
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